Ah, Craig Montgomery, has there ever been a better  villain  with a streak of humor, a bad guy with a tiny bit of gold in his cold hard heart?  We've experienced the ups and downs of Craig since he made his first appearance in Oakdale almost 20 years ago.  He's the big brother to Margo Hughes and Katie Peretti, so he had connections.  But he has been up to his eyeballs in trouble, mostly created by himself, from the first time he laid eyes on Betsy Stewart at Oakdale U. 

Poor Craig, yes I said "poor" Craig!  It's tough to be a bad guy when you're head over heels in love with a woman and you don't know how to express yourself to her.  Craig found his soul mate in Rosanna, and pledged his love to her in two different ceremonies last spring.  I especially loved the second one:

Rosanna: "I, Rosanna, put you, my darling Craig, on notice. I am no blushing bride. I am no easy mark. I am onto you. And if you ever try to pull anything again, ever, this will be your last wedding before your funeral."  

Craig: "I'll toe that mark. And I'll keep my promise to take you on the ride of your life. I will keep you guessing. I will try your patience. And I will test your limits.  I promise you a bumpy ride. Full of chaos. Cliffhangers. What are some other terrible things that starts with "c"?"

Aaron: "Craig"?"  

Craig: "You better believe it, kid.  Rosanna -- I give you all of me -- the good, the bad, the still pretty. Because I love you. And I dare you to stay with me till death do us part."

Of course, that was then, this is now.  Rosanna, an extremely wealthy woman, had everything she wanted except a child.  She could not get pregnant.  She watched her half-sister Carly nurturing two children, and Rosanna's maternal instincts rose up like a tsunami wave.  She informed Craig that she wanted them to adopt a baby.  Craig was already the father of two children, Lucy and Bryant, and he had suffered through the tragic loss of his son Bryant in a car accident.  He did not want to go through that pain again, and he pulled every trick he could think of to ruin their chances of adopting.  He skipped meetings with adoption agency personnel, he set himself up to look guilty of running a gambling operation out of Metro, the club he co-owns with Dusty and Molly, and he played the wide-eyed innocent through it all. 

Rosanna is no rube, she saw right through him, and decided to leave their marriage.  But as I said above, for whatever else he is, Craig loves Rosanna, and he managed to conjure up a baby to present to her.  Did he know the adoption for little Cabot was illegal?  Probably.  He has claimed over and over that he thought everything was aboveboard, but Craig is no dummy either.  He's pulled enough shady deals himself to know that waving a bunch of money in a foreign country (although he didn't seem to know that Ottawa is not a province but a city, in fact the capital of Canada!) and being handed a baby without proper papers and medical records is probably not the legal way to acquire a child.  The fact that the adoption agency owner he dealt with, Annabelle Fettle, was a chain-smoking, wisecracking, smart-aleck old lady was an even bigger tip off. 

Craig might have gotten away with it, if he had only trusted his wife.  Rosanna stepped up to help Paul Ryan recently when he was accused of his fiancée Rose's murder.  She wanted to support her friend; Craig became immensely jealous.  And because Craig knew how he himself had cheated on the people he loved in the past, he worried that Rosanna might be tempted by Paul.  So he bribed Mitzi Manners to lie and finger Paul for Rose's murder.  When Paul was cleared and found out that Craig had tried to frame him,  Paul decided that payback was due.  He discovered the secret of baby Cabot's adoption, and called the Canadian authorities.  When a Mountie showed up in Oakdale with proof that Cabot had been removed illegally from his birth mother, Craig insisted that he had been lied to along with everyone else.  Come on, Craig!  Nobody is ever going to believe your claim of being completely innocent in this, not the Oakdale PD, not the Canadian RCMP, and certainly not Rosanna..

What I can believe is that Craig, for perhaps the first time in a long time, really and truly loves Rosanna.  However, he has no idea how to express that love, nurture that love, or keep that love from withering away.  Throughout his life he has plotted, maneuvered, kept secrets, and committed crimes, until he has completely lost touch with his true feelings.  When those feelings began to emerge with his love for Rosanna, he didn't know how to react honestly, so he fell back on what he knows best; conspiring and scheming to keep his marriage alive.  Poor Craig!  If he had somehow been able to dig down through those twisted layers of evil that have coated him over the years, he could have saved his love and his marriage.   

So what's next for Craig?  Rosanna has left him, in fact, she has cut him off completely.  He has lost everything, and he doesn't understand at all that it was all his fault.  He will stumble and grumble about this whole mess, stomp around and proclaim his innocence, and he will convince himself, if no one else, that he has been wronged.  But will he ever be able to rip away the invisible shell of lies and denial he's built around himself?  If he is able to do that, there may still be a place in Rosanna's heart for him.  But if he continues in his old ways, then he might as well stand in the doorway and wave goodbye to his marriage for good.

I'm in an Oakdale state of mind!
  CAROL


 

Photos courtesy of CBS Daytime and Soapcity